The Absolute Book

Odin is best left out of this. We’re not sure what his intentions are. He’s not himself these days. His head has been turned by many new worshippers. Of the wrong kind.’ Jacob thought about that for a bit. The wrong worshippers for Odin. ‘You mean white supremacists with valknuts tattooed on their man boobs?’ ‘I do,’ she said. ‘Your wits seem intact in some matters.

The Great God of the Deserts, the God from the Void, sequestered himself many hundreds of years ago. His worshippers had too many competing views of his nature, and it unsettled his mind. That’s a thing that can happen to gods. They’re very impressionable.

Let us think for a moment about Hulagu Khan. His sack of Baghdad’s libraries wasn’t just a gesture of hatred against Islamic culture and Syrian scholarship. He also destroyed the city’s bridges. Hulagu understood the relationship between knowledge and communication, communication and commerce, commerce and power. It is as if he took Baghdad and knocked the teeth out of its head. Not just the teeth that bite, but the teeth that facilitate eating and speech. He crippled the city. Hulagu took treasure and slaves, but he wasn’t a covetous conqueror, he didn’t want to stay and enjoy anything. He just wanted to beat the city down and make sure it stayed down.

Was it possible yet to be poor and live decently? Were young men still sent to die in wars made by old men?

Taryn sighed. ‘You know, there were always people who found cause for complaint about falling birth rates whenever women in developing nations got educations and the means of supporting themselves.

Perhaps, in a world too full of people, she was the one too many.

... because what good would it do when a true understanding of what was in store for them couldn't save them from any of it?

I wish I could make a better job of my clothes. My mother taught me about weather and tides, she taught me eight languages and how to make various medicines, but she never thought to teach me to spin and weave and sew, because I was a boy. It seems silly now.

(...) The people with the purse strings don't understand that today doesn't always know what tomorrow will need.

Where they have burned books at the end they will burn people.

We’re not sure what his intentions are. He’s not himself these days. His head has been turned by many new worshippers. Of the wrong kind.’ Jacob thought about that for a bit. The wrong worshippers for Odin. ‘You mean white supremacists with valknuts tattooed on their man boobs?’ ‘I do,’ she said. ‘Your wits seem intact in some matters.

There was no fate. There was what people tell others and those others believe. There was conspiracy and propaganda and inspiration, not fate. Fate was only someone else’s idea of how the world worked, a story people inherit, a lie they’re told. If he’d learned anything, Jacob thought, he’d learned that. That there was no thing that should be, that must be, even the world.

Shift laughed. ‘The ways in which you want to think badly of me are interesting.’ ‘Who eats mice?

I wasn’t aware that not disappointing you was an option, so I’m afraid I haven’t taken any steps to avoid it.

He met her eyes and said, ‘I mean—some things we’ve learnt might not make any kind of sense according to what we’re used to seeing as sense, but they might work with the bits and pieces of knowledge we have.

trying to peddle its pots and pans at the door of this house.

Excuse me if I laugh. The roads are dark and large books block our path. The air we breathe is made of evening air. The world is longer than the road that brings us here.

Taryn knew a lot of people whom she thought of as intellectual snobs. What they were, in fact, were people incapable of relinquishing their sovereign sense that their identity was tied up with what they understood and enjoyed. And they liked to stay sure of themselves, so they never read or watched anything outside what they already approved as good or enjoyable for them.

respond to that except by admitting it? ‘Yes. My eyes are always stinging from the smoke of it.

Suddenly Taryn was furious. 'Why the hell are you always so careful?' 'What else should I be? Most of the good in the world is remedial. It's fixing things and caring for people. Taking care.

Something terrible had happened in his life to send him back to her looking for revenge. He believed she had been unlucky for him and was to be blamed for some calamity, some failure or loss. But he didn't want to tell her about it; he just wanted her to suffer and be reduced, in his imagination and her own. There was no point in understanding any of this if she couldn't see a way through it.

No matter how out of the ordinary demonic possession was, it was still somehow a smoker's lung cancer, a drunk's pancreatitis, a philanderer's STI - a thing she had brought upon herself by not behaving properly.

She felt the Muleskinner was less interested in enjoying her attention than figuring out what he could do for her. There were people who stole near to you, and you could sense their shadows touching you, darkening the air around you, and beginning to stretch out over your life. But it wasn't like that with the Muleskinner. Rather, it was as if Taryn's shadow had attached itself to him, and he wasn't going to feel right again until he had helped her change her life. Taryn sensed that she was dragging the Muleskinner's imagination around after her, and when she left, his thoughts would continue to follow her. He'd keep thinking, What can I do for Taryn?

Katharine Briggs’s comprehensive The Fairies in Tradition and Literature.

Look,’ Taryn said. ‘I’m going to try this one more time. It’s like that thing in Star Trek. The Starfleet regulation that says the doctor can relieve the captain of his duties. The writers probably got it from the real-life navy. Anyway, human beings are the captain. The doctor is the trees and the grasses and the marshes, and the beasts of the field and birds of the air. We humans were declared unfit for command.

Souls may be endemic to this part of the universe,’ Aeng said, ‘but so are flies. Flies far out at sea. Flies on mountaintops.

Everyone is going to want to come and look at my garden.’ ‘Give them seeds or cuttings and send them off,’ Shift said. ‘Tell them the Little God of the Marshlands says they should grow their own gardens.’ ‘That’s good,’ Addy said. ‘People here respect gods.

Shift said, ‘And what if the hillsides your houses are on slip into the valleys, and everything is buried in mud? What if the wind flattens your houses, or floods wash them off their foundations? What if you’re all like too many mound-building birds in the same forest—you get so tired of stealing each other’s twigs and sticks that no nests are finished, and no chicks hatch? You can’t keep doing everything over, so you sit down in the ruins and starve. What if that? What if the floods sweep the soil into the sea, and the sea seeps up through the land and turns it sour? What if the conditions for civilisation are gone?’ Taryn

There’s no point in just providing a spectacle. There’s no point in changing people’s minds or even their world views, but not having the means to change the world. That’s just acting in bad faith.